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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a change of corporate governance occurs after financial crimes in Canada revealed through external whistleblowing.

Based on the methodology of Smaili and Arroyo (2019), the authors implement a qualitative research framework to examine 11 alleged Canadian corporate financial statement fraud cases publicly exposed during the 1995–2012 period.

The analysis suggests that firms had a weak traditional corporate governance mechanism before the external whistleblowing occurred. In almost every case, the chief executive officer (CEO) was also the chair of the board of directors. Although the reports by Dey and Saucier recommend that independent directors make up at least 75% of Canadian boards, we note that the percentage of independent directors was under 70% in six cases. Moreover, only two firms had a whistleblowing policy in place, and seven firms had a major shareholder. Regarding the consequences for corporate governance after whistleblowing, the analysis shows that the companies that survived the whistleblowing had enhanced their internal corporate governance by the third year after the whistleblowing. In fact, at all the surviving companies, the CEO was no longer the chair, and the percentage of independent directors had increased to 80%. However, for those survival companies that did not have a whistleblowing policy before the event, the situation did not change quickly, and they only implemented a policy after the enforcement of the new regulation in the year 2003.

This paper adds new insights to the research on financial crime by investigating the relation between corporate governance and whistleblowing.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether large blockholders are associated with financial statement fraud at their companies. Although a substantial body of prior studies has focused on chief executive officers’ motivations to manipulate financial statements, the correlation between majority shareholders and financial statement fraud has received little attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating whether the sample firms have controlling shareholders or executives (i.e. blockholders vs management) and whether financial statement fraud schemes, motivations and consequences differ between blockholder- and management-controlled firms.

Using a clinical approach, the authors Study 12 Canadian financial statement fraud cases uncovered by the Ontario Securities Commission between 1997 and 2020.

First, the authors find blockholder control in six cases. These findings infer that these large shareholders received private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. The comparative analyzes suggest that fraudulent firms controlled by blockholders go bankrupt more often than those controlled by managers. The authors also find that improper disclosure is the most common fraud scheme in blockholder-controlled firms.

The authors conduct a deep analysis of financial statement fraud cases to examine the of blockholder control on the likelihood of financial statement fraud. This paper adds new insights to the research on financial crime by investigating whether large shareholders affect the probability of fraud and the extent to which they might do so.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an institutional entrepreneurship approach to examining management accounting change triggered by social and environmental concerns.

The study begins with a literature review concerning the role that old institutional economics and new institutional sociology have played in the study of management accounting change, underlining strengths and weaknesses. To deal with the main weaknesses, the institutional entrepreneurship approach is presented and utilized as the basis for the development of a conceptual framework, which is contextualized to the examination of management accounting change triggered by sustainability issues.

Management accounting change literature has not paid enough attention to the social constructivist roots of institutional theory. Through the application of a conceptual framework inspired by institutional change models and institutional entrepreneurship literature, this paper proposes another approach to examine how new management accounting practices are socially constructed during the course of organizational change, particularly in response to sustainability concerns.

This new framework has not yet demonstrated its explanatory power in a particular field.

The paper examines management accounting change as a social construction process led by institutional entrepreneurs who aim to mobilize resources and negotiate the definition and implementation of sustainability strategies and new management accounting practices, which will take environmental and social issues into consideration, in order to reach an agreement on the pre‐institutionalization, diffusion and institutionalization of sustainable practices.

Voluntary corporate social responsibility reporting has developed into an everyday activity for many commercial organizations, and scholarly interest in these practices continues to increase. This paper focusses on one subset of these disclosures, namely the figures relating to environmental expenditures and investments published by various organizations. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the nature, role and significance of such financial environmental information. Despite their seeming accuracy and preciseness, little is known about how such financial environmental information is constructed and subsequently used in organizational settings.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study focussing on a Finnish energy company. The authors build the investigation primarily on 26 semi-structured interviews with employees at all organizational levels, which the authors supplement with various documentary sources. The interpretation draws on the notion of loose coupling, which the authors use as a method theory to provide a better understanding of this complex organizational practice.

The authors highlight the ambiguous and imprecise nature of the outwardly accurate figures provided by the company. The authors argue that disclosed financial environmental information is only loosely coupled with various dimensions, including the organization’s actual activities, its environmental impacts and organizational decision making.

The findings contrast with those of some prior research, which has considered financial environmental information highly valuable. As for broader implications, the paper discusses the accuracy of public records based on such ambiguous organizational figures.